The nursery of the forktail, although quite a large cup-shaped structure, is not easy to discover; it blends well with its surroundings, and the birds certainly will not betray its presence if they know they are being watched. The nest is, to use Hume's words, "sometimes hidden in a rocky niche, sometimes on a bare ledge of rock overhung by drooping ferns and sometimes on a sloping bank, at the root of some old tree, in a very forest of club moss." I once spent several afternoons in discovering a forktail's nest which I was positive existed and contained young, because I had repeatedly seen the parents carrying grubs in the bill. My difficulty was that the stream to which the birds had attached themselves was in a deep ravine, the sides of which were so steep that no animal save a cat could have descended it without making a noise and being seen by the birds. Eventually I decorated my _topi_ with bracken fronds, after the fashion of 'Arry at Burnham Beeches on the August bank holiday. Thus arrayed, I descended to the stream and hid myself in the hollow stump of a tree, near the place where I knew the nest must be. By crouching down and drawing some foliage about me, I was able to command a small stretch of the stream. My arrival was of course the signal for loud outcries on the part of the parent forktails. However, after I had been squatting about ten minutes in my _cache_, to the delight of hundreds of winged insects, the suspicions of the forktails subsided, and the birds began collecting food, working their way upstream. They came nearer and nearer, until one of them passed out of sight, although it was within 10 feet of me. It was thus evident that the nest was so situated that what remained of the tree-trunk obstructed my view of it. This was annoying, but I had one resource left, namely, to sit patiently until the sound of chirping told me that a parent bird was at the nest with food.